mediaVi/iStock via Getty Images Insurers providing war cover in Persian Gulf countries face higher risks as the US and Israel continue their air campaign against Iran. Iran has hit a range of non-military targets in the Gulf in retaliation for the US-Israeli airstrikes, which began Feb. 28. Attacks on critical infrastructure in Gulf states are likely to continue as the US and Israel degrade Iran's...
mediaVi/iStock via Getty Images Insurers providing war cover in Persian Gulf countries face higher risks as the US and Israel continue their air campaign against Iran. Iran has hit a range of non-military targets in the Gulf in retaliation for the US-Israeli airstrikes, which began Feb. 28. Attacks on critical infrastructure in Gulf states are likely to continue as the US and Israel degrade Iran's longer-range attack capabilities, target critical Iranian infrastructure and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operates more autonomously, according to Jack Kennedy, head of Middle East and North Africa country risk at S&P Global Market Intelligence. "With Iran's command chain progressively targeted, military units appear to be shifting to a doctrine of decentralized operations, increasing the likelihood of opportunistic strikes," Kennedy said in emailed comments March 9. Range of risks While Iran has targeted US military infrastructure in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, it has also hit civilian property, including hotels, airports and energy facilities. Hotels in Dubai and Bahrain were attacked early in the conflict, while Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. was forced shut a refinery after suffering a fire caused by drone strikes . Bahrain's energy company, Bapco Energies B.S.C. Closed, declared force majeure on its group operations following an attack on its refinery complex. A possible early example of the IRGC's autonomy was the attack on the Port of Duqm in Oman, for which the Iranian regime reportedly apologized, according to Bilal Bassiouni, head of risk forecasting at risk advisory firm Pangea-Risk. "We may see more similar situations where the IRGC or military leadership take on ad-hoc responsibilities [for choosing targets]," Bassiouni said in a March 3 interview. That heightens the risk for a wider variety of assets. The likelihood of Iranian strikes on energy facilities grows the more the US and Israeli air campaign intensifies and the more cornere...
Polymarket has partnered with Palantir Technologies and TWG AI to develop a next-generation sports integrity platform. This was announced by Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan. The collaboration focuses on building advanced monitoring tools using Palantir’s data integration and anomaly detection capabilities, combined with TWG AI’s expertise in financial infrastructure and sports. The core technology is...
Polymarket has partnered with Palantir Technologies and TWG AI to develop a next-generation sports integrity platform. This was announced by Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan. The collaboration focuses on building advanced monitoring tools using Palantir’s data integration and anomaly detection capabilities, combined with TWG AI’s expertise in financial infrastructure and sports. The core technology is the Vergence AI engine, a joint venture product from Palantir and TWG AI created last year. Key goals include: Detecting, preventing, and reporting suspicious or anomalous trading activity in real time. Monitoring millions of data points to flag potential manipulation, unusual patterns, or misuse of information. Screening participants against banned lists from traditional sports betting. Producing compliance reports and tools to support leagues, teams, and regulators. This comes amid growing scrutiny of prediction markets—especially sports-related ones—as they’ve exploded in popularity for events like elections, geopolitics, and now sports. Concerns about insider trading, market manipulation, and the need for credibility have intensified, with some platforms including Polymarket already referring insider cases to regulators like the CFTC. The partnership aims to set a higher standard for integrity in prediction markets, particularly as they push toward more regulated frameworks; potential U.S. federal oversight for certain aspects. Polymarket emphasized that this could benefit the broader sports ecosystem by providing better visibility and tools than the current fragmented, state-by-state sports betting compliance setups. They described it as promoting “trust, transparency, and reliability” for participants and institutions, highlights it as a response to insider trading risks in these markets, with the system designed to identify such activity proactively. On X, reactions range from excitement about scaling and enterprise-grade tech to conspiracy-tinged speculation; compa...
Two tankers carrying liquefied petroleum gas are heading to India after crossing the Strait of Hormuz, providing some relief to acute shortages as the war in the Persian Gulf disrupts supply of the cooking fuel. The ships were granted safe transit through the strait — which has been all but closed for nearly two weeks — after a deal between New Delhi and Tehran, according to people familiar with t...
Two tankers carrying liquefied petroleum gas are heading to India after crossing the Strait of Hormuz, providing some relief to acute shortages as the war in the Persian Gulf disrupts supply of the cooking fuel. The ships were granted safe transit through the strait — which has been all but closed for nearly two weeks — after a deal between New Delhi and Tehran, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter. They did not provide details. The tankers — Shivalik and Nanda Devi — were chartered by state-run Indian Oil Corp. and should arrive in India next week, the people said. The vessels are owned by state-run Shipping Corp of India Ltd. India’s Ministry of External Affairs didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. An Iranian official familiar with the matter, who also declined to be named as he’s not authorized to speak to the media, said he could not confirm an agreement. Indian Oil did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment. Both ships have signaled through their AIS systems, used by ships to transmit their whereabouts, that they’re Indian government vessels. Ship-tracking data shows that the Shivalik has already sailed through the strait. The Nanda Devi appears to be in transit, although electronic interference around the waterway complicates accurate monitoring of location. Both loaded from Ras Laffan in Qatar. Read More: Crowds Besiege India’s LPG Dealers as War Crimps Supply India has been suffering acute shortage of LPG, used for cooking and industrial processes and in petrochemical units to make plastics. The country is the second-largest importer of of the fuel, and takes 90% of it from the Middle East. India, which also takes a large proportion of its crude from the Persian Gulf, has been in talks with Iran to secure the passage of tankers through the strait. A number of LPG vessels are now lined up to make the crossing, the people said.
peshkov/iStock via Getty Images By Igor Oliveira Quantitative finance continues to debate the reliability and limits of model-driven investment strategies. One central question is how much weight investors should place on backtesting. In The Factor Mirage: How Quant Models Go Wrong , Marcos López de Prado, PhD, and Vincent Zoonekynd, PhD, outline why investors should move beyond accepting historic...
peshkov/iStock via Getty Images By Igor Oliveira Quantitative finance continues to debate the reliability and limits of model-driven investment strategies. One central question is how much weight investors should place on backtesting. In The Factor Mirage: How Quant Models Go Wrong , Marcos López de Prado, PhD, and Vincent Zoonekynd, PhD, outline why investors should move beyond accepting historical performance at face value and focus on understanding why a model works. That is a valuable contribution to strengthening the rigor of quantitative investing — and one that invites further reflection on how that reasoning is structured. It may help to frame the issue not as a binary choice between correlation and causation, but as a layered problem in which different forms of reasoning play distinct roles. In practice, the choice is rarely between simple correlation and fully specified causality. Most investment research operates somewhere in between. Sometimes we can describe and test a mechanism directly. Sometimes we cannot. The system may move too quickly, key variables may be only partially observable, or the time and resources required to build a richer model may not be available. In those settings, association-based reasoning still has value. That is not a defect of finance; it is a general feature of decision-making under uncertainty. Association Under Constraint Human beings often rely on associations when there is no time to construct a full causal account. That is not necessarily irrational; it can be adaptive. A fast association can guide action before slower, more elaborate reasoning is possible. The same is true in investment practice. When relevant drivers cannot be directly observed or causal structure is only partly understood, associational signals may still contain useful information. Association is not explanation. The question is not whether association has value, but whether it is sufficient. For institutional investors, this distinction has practica...
Andrii Dodonov/iStock via Getty Images On Wednesday this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Consumer Price Index report for February. Economists had been expecting to see a year-on-year increase of around 2.4 percent in the headline inflation number, with an attendant gain of 2.5 percent in core CPI, excluding the volatile categories of energy and food. That is more or less what hap...
Andrii Dodonov/iStock via Getty Images On Wednesday this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Consumer Price Index report for February. Economists had been expecting to see a year-on-year increase of around 2.4 percent in the headline inflation number, with an attendant gain of 2.5 percent in core CPI, excluding the volatile categories of energy and food. That is more or less what happened. But it happened last month; in other words, before a series of air strikes by the US and Israel had the effect of shutting down the passage of shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. As a refresher from last week’s commentary: approximately 20 percent of the world’s oil exports pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a sea lane with a span of roughly 35 miles bounded on three sides by Iran and one side by Oman. How much longer will this critical bottleneck remain shut? Given the volatile state of play in this unfolding crisis, who knows? Maybe tensions will be resolved by the time you are reading this piece on Friday afternoon. Maybe it will be out of service for weeks or even months to come. In a column this week on Substack, the economist Paul Krugman noted that the “hit to oil prices will if anything be bigger than earlier crises” (Krugman’s own words) if the strait were to remain closed on an ongoing basis. With that in mind, it is worth spending some time looking at what those previous crises meant in terms of inflation – both the core number which is the main object of focus for the Fed, and the headline number which actually takes into account the money you and I spend every week on groceries and gas. Forget that February CPI report, and prepare for something different in March and April. Not Just a Headline Story In the chart below, we show the trend for both headline and core CPI since January 1970. We focus on four key events over this span of 56 years: the Yom Kippur War of 1973 that led to the first round of OPEC oil price shocks, then the Iranian Revol...
Key Points In late February, the U.S. and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Targeted strikes against Iran's energy infrastructure could send oil prices surging. History shows that the stock market is resilient despite short-term uncertainties from geopolitical events. 10 stocks we like better than S&P 500 Index › On Feb. 28, joint forces between the U.S. and Israel launched Operati...
Key Points In late February, the U.S. and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Targeted strikes against Iran's energy infrastructure could send oil prices surging. History shows that the stock market is resilient despite short-term uncertainties from geopolitical events. 10 stocks we like better than S&P 500 Index › On Feb. 28, joint forces between the U.S. and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury -- a coordinated strike against Iran. Since this military campaign started, the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) has dropped as low as 2% but is now virtually breakeven as of mid-day trading on March 10. While investors will likely approach the broader stock market with heightened caution for the time being, perhaps no other sector is under more scrutiny than the energy industry right now. Considering Iran is a major producer of oil, it's natural to wonder how oil explorers and refiners will navigate this conflict. Will AI create the world's first trillionaire? Our team just released a report on the one little-known company, called an "Indispensable Monopoly" providing the critical technology Nvidia and Intel both need. Continue » Let's explore how the Iran conflict could impact the global oil market as Operation Epic Fury continues to play out. From there, I'll draw on a number of similar historical events to help investors understand how major geopolitical narratives impact both the stock market and oil stocks in particular. How the Strait of Hormuz impacts global oil supply As a member of OPEC, Iran plays a central role in global oil dynamics. Before the current conflict started in the region, Iran produced around 3.5 million barrels of oil per day. China is by far Iran's largest consumer of oil, with other Middle Eastern nations such as Syria and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) accounting for a smaller portion of the country's exports. The conflict in Iran could impact oil production in two ways. First, Iran's oil production could fall by way of sanctions and infra...
Gary Yeowell/DigitalVision via Getty Images Over the last decade, virtually every small business has replaced its front cash register with a tablet, and almost every community bank has migrated their back-office functions into the cloud. The infrastructure enabling these changes runs through a handful of companies that most consumers have never heard of, and the largest of them, Fiserv ( FISV ), r...
Gary Yeowell/DigitalVision via Getty Images Over the last decade, virtually every small business has replaced its front cash register with a tablet, and almost every community bank has migrated their back-office functions into the cloud. The infrastructure enabling these changes runs through a handful of companies that most consumers have never heard of, and the largest of them, Fiserv ( FISV ), recently saw its stock price cut by more than 70%. While the company's asset base, customer list, and revenues remain largely the same, in 2025, Fiserv's new management released a bombshell report: that prior double digit organic growth was inflated by Argentinian hyperinflation and a mix of non-recurring revenue . In turn, the stock, which had started to underperform, went into freefall as investors who had previously bought into this fast-growing, high-margin fintech story ran for the exits. In 2026, management is guiding for virtually flat revenue growth and reduced earnings per share. Clearly, there are issues that will take some time for the new team to clean up. However, now trading at a single-digit P/E ratio, I believe that all of this pain, and then some, has been priced into the stock. With even unambitious estimates and multiple assumptions, there's a clear path to significant, double-digit annualized returns for investors at this price. Today, I'll touch on what went wrong, how management is hoping to fix it and make the case that shares of FISV could produce substantial returns in the years ahead. Sound good? Let's dive in. Financials First off, as I mentioned, Fiserv is a financial technology company with two relatively unrelated segments: Financial Solutions, which offers back-end software systems for banks, and Merchant Solutions, which offers Clover, a business software that acts as an operating & payments system for retail stores, restaurants, and the like. While these two segments don't offer many natural opportunities to cross-sell, they are complementary...